Saguaro Riptide

Jack hadn’t had time to pack before leaving Vegas. He bought the essentials in the hotel gift shop. A disposable razor, some shaving cream, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. Old Spice was the only pit-stick available. Jack knew that it would make him smell like someone’s grandpa, but it was better than nothing.

A couple of things he couldn’t find. He asked the little blue-rinsed lady behind the counter if she stocked jockey shorts and socks, and she informed him that she did not in a tone that made him feel like he’d better run right out and perform an act of contrition or something.

He needed a clean shirt, too, and he could see without asking that the little lady stocked a somewhat limited assortment. The shirts on display were silk, kind of classy. The material anyway. As for patterns, Jack had his choice of horseshoes, bucking broncos, mesas, or cacti. He chose the latter, figuring that subliminally it would make him seem more intimidating once he caught up with Vince Komoko.

If he caught up with Vince Komoko.

If Vince Komoko was still alive.

And if Vince Komoko could be intimidated by a guy whose face had quite recently looked like several pounds of raw hamburger.

Jack shook his head. Those and many more ifs were out there in front of him somewhere, but there was no sense thinking about them right now.

He piled the merchandise on the counter. The blue-rinsed lady sniffed over said merchandise as she rang it up.

At the last moment Jack noticed a pair of tweezers on a little display rack and added them to the pile.

He glanced at the price tag. Eight ninety-five for a pair of fucking tweezers.

Jesus, that was crazy.

Jack handed over his corporate plastic.

Back in the room. Jack checked his shorts and was heartened to find that they were free of skid marks. Then he got cleaned up, after which he dressed and stowed everything except the tweezers in one of the plastic bags that the motel provided for wet swimming trunks. Not the most elegant luggage. But, then again. Jack was a guy going off to face the world in dirty underwear and soiled socks.

In the mellow glow of the bathroom light, the Elephant Man could have convinced himself that he was Brad Pitt’s twin brother. Translation: the light was unsuitable for Jack’s purposes. He unplugged the nightstand lamp, removed the shade, and plugged it in next to the bathroom mirror. He still felt like he was in a cave, but there wasn’t much else he could do about it.

Jack looked himself over. His face was pretty much free of swelling, and the bruises had faded. But there were those goddamn stitches, jutting under his eyebrows like the thick hairs on a sewer rat’s tail.

Jack’s fingers traveled his forehead, kind of sneaking up on his eyebrows. Then they blitzkrieged, squeezing the stitched flesh tentatively at first, and then not so gently.

Nothing busted open. The new scar tissue held tough.

Jack chuckled. “And Freddy G said your skin was shot. Said you were all washed up. You’re in your prime, laddie. They’ll need a silver bullet to stop you.”

He grabbed the tweezers and went to work.

That was when Jack remembered that he’d left Frankenstein all alone in his condo back in Vegas.

Damn. More unfinished business. He’d have to find someone to feed the monster while he was gone.

TWO

Johnny Da Nang liked all kinds of people, but he especially liked big blonds who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.

He had one of ’em right now. Down there between his legs, every bit of her mojo workin’ over every inch of his. Johnny leaned back in the Corvette bucket that fit all five foot flat of him like a glove. He stared across the parking lot, through the palm trees, at the rising sun beyond the Luxor pyramid. Sly Stone let loose a screech on the ’vette’s primo sound system. Johnny matched it and the blond’s beaucoup backside shimmied in delight.

Viva Las Vegas. Can you dig it?

Johnny certainly could. He and the blond had left the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino just past six in the a.m. Johnny’s band had a gig there playing soul sounds from the sixties and seventies, which in Johnny Da Nang’s opinion just happened to be the finest sounds on the planet. Well, if you excluded The Fifth Dimension. There was way too much vanilla in that band’s sound for Johnny’s taste, thank you very much.

Johnny was the lead singer and hence the busiest fuck in the group. Damn but the women seemed to go for a Vietnamese boy who could sound like Al Green one minute and Smokey Robinson the next.

Even if he was five foot flat.

In dollars it wasn’t the greatest gig. No cakewalk either- one set after a fuckin’ ’nother, maybe a ten-minute break in between if he was lucky, just time enough for a thimble-sized Stoli over ice at the bar, then back at it, singin’ “ABC” and moonwalkin’ like Michael when he used to be black. Sure it was a tough gig. But a band had to start somewhere, didn’t it?

Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms were starting in the land of the five-dollar slot. The Napalms were Johnny’s brothers and there were four of them, all older than Johnny. Together they worked a small room with a two-drink minimum, and they put the butts in the buckets. Hired ostensibly to lubricate the plentiful but notoriously penny- ante Asian gamblers from LA, Johnny and his boys also drew a sizable crowd of brothers who’d survived the bottomside of the ’Nam experience and wanted to get all nostalgic about their last R amp;R in Saigon. Wow, they’d get drunk and collar Johnny at the bar while he was sucking down a Stoli, buy him drinks he could have gotten for free and tell him how much they missed that mama-san who gave them their very first case of the clap.

Roger that. Show business surely had its downside. Johnny had heard it all before, but he always listened because. . wow, you never knew, you know? Maybe one of the brothers would turn out to be Quincy Jones’s cousin or something, and Johnny and his boys would put the move to the groove, end up with Quincy as their producer, tunes in heavy rotation on MTV, the whole enchilada.

Hey, it could happen, couldn’t it?

Still, it took some serious patience to listen to the brothers go on about the ’Nam. Hey, Johnny had been born in Saigon. And he had to admit that the brothers weren’t really his favorite people, because he’d spent most of his youth in South Central LA, and a good bit of that time he’d been the designated neighborhood punching bag. Johnny much preferred spending time with blonds. The big ones. The ones with two- seat buckets and mouths that put the baddest Dirt Devil to shame.

Hey, it wasn’t that he was racist or sexist. It was just his own personal voice of experience talking. And that voice said, Johnny, not one blond-no matter how big-has ever beat you up.

Can you dig it?

Johnny could and currently was. He and the blond had been heading for his condo, but she just couldn’t seem to wait and neither could he. Wow, it happened every time he closed the show with “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” The way Johnny dug down into that one, the ladies just ate it up. Nail it, not a dry pair of panties in the house. Outta sight and all right.

He’d sure ’nough come a long, long way from South Central. Wow, he could remember his first days in America, six years old in a schoolhouse full of black faces, trying to string those damn vowels and consonants together in the right way so he’d sound like everyone else. No one at home to help him because his old man, an ARVN colonel, was trying to put the muscle to the hustle on the streets of LA and didn’t give a damn how anyone talked.

When it came to conversation, the colonel was concerned with only two things- volume and intensity.

Johnny had to hand it to the old man. The colonel had left Saigon with his family and an entire division’s monthly payroll. He’d used the money to buy several neighborhood markets in South Central and put a kickass corps